


Time, Like An Ever-Rolling Stream

by afterandalasia



Category: Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
Genre: 20th Century, Community: dark_bingo, Community: disney_kink, Developing Relationship, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Immortality, Light Angst, Off-Screen Major Character Death, Post-Movie(s), Wordcount: 1.000-3.000, World Wars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-09
Updated: 2013-07-09
Packaged: 2017-12-18 06:23:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/876631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterandalasia/pseuds/afterandalasia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Immortality has a way of bringing people together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time, Like An Ever-Rolling Stream

**Author's Note:**

> From the awesome anon [prompt](http://disney-kink.livejournal.com/361.html?thread=744041#t744041) at : "Atlantis and immortality have a way of bringing people together", crossed with the square "Gaining/Losing Immortality".
> 
> Moderately dark, but not as heavily so as much of my other work. Completely ignores the existence of the sequel.

Audrey Ramirez was seventeen years old when her father retired and she found herself the chief mechanic of possibly the biggest damn corporation in the world. Of course, considering that she might as well have had oil in her veins, she took to it pretty damn well, even if she did say so herself. She felt at home running among machines, shouting at the burly mechanics who didn’t know what to make of her, and then she felt a sense of pride as the money in her savings built up and up, towards that level that she wanted to open her father’s shop again.

She was nineteen years old when she was told to take her place among a team that had already worked together to retrieve some book from Iceland, years ago under the leadership of some man called Thaddeus Thatch. Everyone spoke highly of the man, and Audrey was hoping that his grandson was going to be a similarly striking figure.

The least said about the grandson Milo, the better. Though she supposed that he did get better at time.

 

 

She was still nineteen when they returned to the surface world once again, with knowledge in their heads and, more importantly, money in their pockets. There weren’t many of them left by then: just her and Vinnie, Sweet, Mole, and a couple of others. It wasn’t the most promising of groups, or the most coherent for that matter, and for the most part they just shook hands, mumbled promises about writing, and left.

A few months later, she and her father opened up a new shop. It took a while to persuade the customers to talk to her, rather than her father, but eventually they came to learn that the young woman would be the one putting the cars and trucks and boilers back together, whilst her father took the money and chatted to them over a good cup of coffee in the lounge.

Her sister held the title for two years before losing through a KO in the second round. She went on to marry a scholar, which Audrey supposed just went to show that you never knew.

She wasn’t called to help with America went to join the war in Europe in 1917. In some ways it annoyed her, because she knew full well that she was at least as good as any of the men out there, but if her father ever asked, she would shrug and laugh and say, “Hey, it reduces the competition, right?”

The war hardly lasted more than a year anyway, and most of the men came back to America. And people would always need things fixing, so a mechanic was never out of work. By the time that the twenties came round, the idea of a female mechanic wasn’t quite so strange either.

 

 

Audrey Ramirez was twenty-two years old when she found the first white in her hair. She was surprised that the mirror didn’t smash with the stream of profanity that fell from her lips, then she plucked out the hairs, ruffled up her curls, and put it down to chance. Her sister was still fighting with a full mop of black curls, arranging her husband’s life, and now preparing to bring another little Ramirez (because to be fair, there had been no way that she had been taking her husband’s name) into the world. Audrey hoped that it was a girl, to continue the tradition of causing trouble for men the world over.

To another stream of cursing, her hair seemed to just grow back with more and more white in it. Several times she would think of the Atlanteans and their white hair, and once she even took the necklace from round her neck and tried to crush it in a vice, only for the vice to shear off and fall to the floor in pieces. But maybe it was just chance, she lied to herself, and jokingly compared her hair with her father’s whenever she actually got round to washing all of the grime out of it.

 

 

Audrey Ramirez was twenty-six, her niece was three and just learning to hit things with a hammer hard enough to make them go ting!, when her hair turned completely white and her father’s health took a turn for the worse. She left most of the running of the shop to the two men who now worked for her to look after her father, but he declined rapidly and died within months, a thin and frail old man who could not have seemed further from the father she remembered from her childhood.

She returned to the shop, but it didn’t quite seem right to be there without her father singing along to the jazz on the wireless or complaining about the state of the world these days. She sold it to one of the workers for far less than it was worth, knowing that he would do well with it, and lived with her sister’s family for a few years, doing jobs for friends and relatives more than for money, helping out around the house and making sure that it had the best-running car in the town. Her sister had three daughters, and then a son, and Audrey doted over them all equally, although it was the boy who seemed to love her the most, grabbing at the pendant at her neck or at her hair, which as well as white now fell straight about her face.

 

 

She was thirty-five, beginning to get a reputation around the town for being strange, and starting to do more and more work for people because she would do it at a lower cost than other mechanics, when her sister hollered through the house one day that some friend of hers was at the door, so did she want to come and talk to him?

Audrey rolled her eyes as she crawled out from under the boiler, which she had been trying to make more efficient so that it didn’t need so much fuel, and wandered towards the front door. She had never really grown out of wearing overalls and gloves, though she had taken to tying her hair back so that it didn’t fall in her eyes so much, and she supposed that in some ways she didn’t look all that different than she had in the days when she ran around a submarine and fixed boilers in an underground city, and life had been so very different. It seemed a hell of a long way away.

By the time that she reached the door, her sister was already hollering at the girls to get down out of the tree in the garden before they ripped their dungarees. Audrey left her to it.

“Hey,” said the man at the door.

For a moment she didn’t recognise him. Perhaps she should have done, in his long dark coat and with his thick moustache, but she blamed it on the fact the the moustache had gone white and the coat was looking rather shabby.

“Vinnie?” she asked, then regretted it immediately because man, that was a stupid question.

“Yeah,” he replied. They both stood there awkwardly for a moment. “Can I come in?”

They wandered through to the kitchen at the back, where stew was still bubbling very slowly in its pan and the house was at its warmest. Audrey got them both coffee, and they sat at the table stiltedly, before something seemed to snap and the words tumbled out of him as if from the breaking of a dam.

“I’ve been looking for the others for a while now,” said Vinnie. “Sweet done got himself killed out in the war. Stupid Brits dragging us into that.”

His left arm was heavily scarred. She wondered whether he had been out there as well.

“Mole was down working at that mining site in Texas that went and caved in. God knows what happened to him. Maybe he’s still living down there, I don’t know. Under the soil. He’d like it.”

She wasn’t sure what to say. Vinnie’s eyes were fixed on the coffee in his hands, though he made no move to drink it.

“Cookie didn’t live too long after the expedition. Don’t think he ever really got over having to come back east. Wilhelmina either; her lungs gave out on her.”

“That means there’s only us left, doesn’t it?” Audrey said.

“Yeah,” said Vinnie.

There was another moody silence.

“My parents are both dead now,” said Vinnie. “Brother too; the war got him. Just me left.”

“It’s just me and my sister over here,” she replied.

For a moment neither of them seemed to be able to look at each other, then finally they looked up, caught each others’ eyes, and knew in an instant what they saw in each other.

“Everyone else is getting old and dying,” he said. “Everyone but us.”

 

 

Audrey Ramirez was thirty-nine years old, Vinnie Santorini was forty-eight, when they both finally figured that neither of them was doing too well just doing odd jobs around the town, and they moved up to the city to get work in the industries there. Unrest was stirring among the European powers, the papers said, and spilling out into the rest of the world, but America was too worried with her own problems to worry about places as far away as Manchuria and Abyssinia and Albania. There were hardly enough jobs to go around on this side of the Atlantic; who cared what the far side were doing? What had seemed like a lot of money twenty years before wasn’t looking to be so much now, whatever Whitmore had promised.

They struggled through, though, and life started to get better, and though it was a lot easier not to mention what had happened before, occasionally one of them would say something like, “Do you remember how the princess shone when we let her go?” or “I dreamt about the city again last night,” and the other would know what they meant. Once when they were sleeping, Audrey’s head on Vinnie’s chest, their pendants tangled in the night, and Audrey cursed royally the next morning when they had to separate themselves from each other and drag themselves off to face the day.

Neither of them really had to say that they didn’t want children. The eldest of Audrey’s nieces got married in nineteen thirty-eight, and Audrey and Vinnie stayed for the wedding but not so much for the party, when people gave them sideways looks and she couldn’t help comparing herself to her sister, older by only a few years but with the difference -- aside from their hair -- looking so much greater.

 

 

Audrey Ramirez was forty-six years old, and Vinnie Santorini was fifty-five, when America went to war once again and demand exploded for people who knew how to handle themselves around machines and explosives. It suited them fine, at least, though Audrey wasn’t sure whether time was really passing more quickly nowadays or it was just that she was getting older.

All that they seemed to do after a while was lull in and out of war. The cars got more advanced, the explosives became more powerful, the world grew increasingly fast and increasingly violent. It seemed like the world forgot how to do anything but fight, and Audrey found that, somehow, she simply could not stand it. More and more often she would speak, long and angry and loud, and only to Vinnie because he was the only one that could understand half of the words that she said. When she remembered how it had been before all of these wars had come, and before the world had shrunk so much.

“You know,” said Vinnie one evening, in that lovely lazy accent that he had never lost, and which still sometimes made her ask him to talk, to say anything, just so that she could hear it. “Maybe we could... go back.”

“Go back where?” she said, punching him on the arm, though she already knew full well where he meant.

He gave her a pointed look, as if to rub it in. “Go back to Atlantis. They’re used to this immortality thing, right? And hey, everyone needs things blowing up. And fixing.”

“And fixing after blowing up,” she added with a smile, finishing their old sing-song that had developed over the years. Her smile faded again, though, and she looked away, bowing her head. “Nah. I remember Atlantis. All plants and crystals and that. And not a lot of clothes.”

“It’s been a long time,” he said. “It’ll change.”

She shook her head. “Their whole world is immortal. Why would they have to change? Nah, they’ll just make things right for them again.”

“What do you think, then?” He drew a slim pencil from his pocket and started rolling it back and forth between his fingers. His hands always wanted to be busy, and the cops and the government didn’t exactly like people having explosives around any more. Not like they had managed to get away with once upon a time. “Just sit and watch this world change?”

She went to shrug, then tilted her head and looked at him with a touch of her old smile back. “Or we could go find something to do with it.”

A long pause, then he nodded slowly. “I like the sound of that.”

“Good.” She got to her feet, wandered over to him, and leant over. He twitched slightly to look towards her, and she grinned fully. “Two for flinching.”

She pressed a kiss against each of his cheeks, then turned and wandered towards the kitchen. There would always be somewhere in the world, she was sure.


End file.
